CLEVELAND, Ohio — The Cleveland Museum of Art’s once annual May Show remains the sine qua non of local art exhibitions, at least for Northeast Ohio art lovers of a certain age.
Inaugurated in 1919 to nurture the city’s fledgling art scene, the exhibition provided a regular burst of attention for local artists within the august confines of the museum.
Artists submitted large numbers of artworks for consideration. Museum curators or guest jurors selected works from those submissions for the exhibition. Prizes were awarded, and the museum occasionally bought work from the show. Collectors were also allowed to buy, enabling them to build May Show collections of their own.
A remarkable 1985 news photo in The Plain Dealer’s archive shows a virtual stampede of enthusiasts led by radio interviewer Rena Blumberg rushing forward at a May Show opening, just as a museum employee retracted a crowd control ribbon holding them back.
The museum discontinued the exhibition in 1993, perhaps in recognition that it had become tired and stale, despite the impression created by the 1985 photo. Yet May Show nostalgia persists. A number of enthusiasts — perhaps a significant number — fervently wish the museum would bring it back.
The museum has no plans to do so, but representatives said in an email that it looks forward to continuing its work with local and emerging artists through its exhibition program, “not just in University Circle, but also at Transformer Station [in Ohio City] and our new Community Arts Center [in Tremont near Clark-Fulton].’'
To address the May Show question directly, the non-profit Artists Archives of the Western Reserve, which is dedicated to preserving and exhibiting works by artists of the region, held an online panel discussion on the topic May 12. A Zoom recording of the event can be streamed for free at artistsarchives.org.
I participated, along with Case Western Reserve University professor Henry Adams and Key Jo Lee, the Cleveland museum’s director of academic affairs and curator of special projects. Michael Gill, executive director, editor, and publisher of the Collective Arts Network, which publishes CAN Journal, the essential, go-to guide to the Northeast Ohio art scene, moderated.
Our viewpoints differed but all of us agreed that in some way, the museum should do more to engage the region’s artists and that now is a good time to raise the question.
Adams vigorously advocated for a return of the May Show. But he called for a more democratic and celebratory format modeled on Parade the Circle, the annual festival in which community groups create floats and circulate around Wade Oval in University Circle along with dancers, giant puppets, bands and stilt walkers.
The museum inaugurated the parade 30 years ago, right around the time it dropped the May Show. The event was not be held last year and will be held this year in a different “Parade the City” format because of the coronavirus pandemic.
In a time of sharp political divisions, Adams said that Parade the Circle has shown how the museum can bring people together to “marvel at each other’s creativity.”
“The display of theatrical flair and artistic talent at Parade the Circle has been quite up to the level of most of the traveling exhibitions on view at the museum, many of which have been distinctly lackluster,” he said.
If the May Show was criticized for compromising on the museum’s usual standards of quality, Adams said he considered that viewpoint snobbish, arguing there’s a danger in being “concerned too much with quality rather than too little.”
“The very goal of the May Show should be to upend things, to turn things upside down,’' he said,
Adams also said the museum should display works by high school students, in order to encourage emerging talents and broaden the institution’s audience — which is something it says it very much wants to do. “You can bet that if kids had their work on view the museum, their parents’ friends and relatives would come and see it,” Adams said.
As my readers know, I’m against bringing back the May Show. It took up space on the exhibition calendar that crowded out exhibitions of modern and contemporary art from outside Cleveland. The museum has improved in this area in recent decades and has stepped up the frequency of exhibitions on Black American artists, in particular. But there’s still room for improvement.
When Robert P. Bergman directed the museum from 1993 to 1999, the museum tried seriously to devote more time and space to new art from around the world and to do the same for Northeast Ohio art. It held a big, curated invitational exhibit on selected Cleveland artists in 1994, and staged a second major regional show, called “Urban Evidence,’' in 1996, the city’s bicentennial year.
Also in 1996, it organized “Transformations in Cleveland Art, 1796-1946,’' a major historical survey on the art of the region, accompanied by a catalog that remains an excellent reference on the topic.
Other locally focused shows followed, including the big 2000 retrospective on industrial designer Viktor Schreckengost, curated by Adams when he was a curator at the museum.
But the museum’s attention to locally produced art has wavered over the past 20 years. One reason is that high turnover among directors diminished its ability to follow through on the direction Bergman initiated. Also, the museum focused primarily from 2005 to 2013 on completing its $320 million expansion and renovation.
That project includes two rooms in the museum’s East Wing devoted to modern and Contemporary Cleveland art. At times, the museum has also sprinkled works by local artists in the rest of the contemporary galleries.
My view is that the museum needs to organize a sequel to the 1996 “Transformations” exhibition that would bring local art history up to the present. The museum could also organize a carefully curated local survey show, say, once every five or six years, so as not to pull attention from the new FRONT International: Cleveland Triennial for Contemporary Art, which is also making a point of including local work.
Lee, for her part, was skeptical about resuming the May Show as it was, in part because it was largely run by white males.
“No matter what the year, whether there were 33 categories or six, whether the artist could enter 20 pieces or two, all agreed that those with the education, talent, and drive to determine quality, were largely male and overwhelmingly white,’' she said. It was, “culturally a closed-circuit conversation.”
She wasn’t arguing that an all-Black jury today would be any less subject to limitations of class or racial perspective. Judgment is subjective, she said.
But as a Black woman, she said, “I cannot see in the mediated record that anyone who looks like me has been given the platform to address this show.”
What she wanted, was somehow to recapture the feeling that the show once created.
“I’m seeing the passion exhibited in the [Zoom] chat and in the question and the individual examples of the benefits gained from either showing or going to that show,’' she said.
She suggested having a regular program in which artists could display their works inside the institution, within a gallery of their choice, in order to spark conversations.
In such a context, she’d want to ask an artist “why did you select to have your work contextualized here?”
Such dialogues, she said, could show how contemporary art produced within the region expresses the present moment, but also has the power to change how works in the permanent collection are perceived.
“It’s about how they [would] help us see that past completely differently.’'
“I’d like to see that happen on a regular basis rather than something trapped in the mire of imperial authority that museums have,’' she said.
Lee is certainly right that judgment is subjective and expresses the values of the person doing the judging.
But in a world where time and space and attention are limited, even within one of America’s wealthiest art museums, choices have to be made.
In part, that’s why we go to museums. We want to see those choices, and to know who made them, and why.
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